I have tried many free and open source CAD programs, no one is good enough to be AutoCAD alternative. I found LibreCAD, the relative new 2D CAD software which has good potential, it’s already have many CAD essential features.

I occasionally will create some videos and share them with my friends as DVD videos, to do it I need a DVD authoring tool. Sony DVD Architect Studio, Roxio MyDVD VideoLab and Corel DVD MovieFactory are some of the best commercial DVD authoring software. But because I create videos not for money, I’d rather choose not to spend money for it. I found DVDStyler, it’s a great free DVD authoring tool I’ve ever used.

Trimage Image Compressor and Yahoo! Smush.it are free tools for optimizing images losslessly. Both work similar but may not give you the same result. I have done some testings and here I will review and show you what I’ve found from the tests.

You don’t have to pay high for software to create 3D visualization images. Blender is open source 3D graphics software, full featured but free. You can use Blender for modeling, animating, texturing even for games making.

Trimage Image Compressor is an open source tool for optimizing PNG and JPEG files. If you use Yahoo! Smush.it, then you should try Trimage Image Compressor. One major advantage of using Trimage Image Compressor over Yahoo! Smush.it is it’s not an online tool, you don’t have to go online for optimizing your images.

Image optimizing is a good thing every web designer should do. It will make the image load faster and save bandwidth. There are many tools available to perform this task, the free and perhaps the easiest one is Smush.it.

Adobe Photoshop is a great graphics/photo editing program but it is expensive. Most people especially freelancers like me aren’t able to afford it. Luckily I found GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), it’s open source software free for personal and commercial use. I’ve been looking for and trying to use many graphics editing programs for years, but now I will stick to GIMP. Because it’s really has some good reasons to love it.